War of the Seven States of Magic

So, you want to know what Norvendae and War of the Seven States of Magic (WotSSoM) is going to be like? Well, imagine the best in crawling, vaulting, wall-climbing, and free-running from the video games like the multitude of ninja-oriented games, Spiderman, or Assassin’s Creed. But without glitches and crap.

Picture fast-paced combat that will enable your character to do all kinds of imaginable stunts without maps, miniatures, weird tokens, or lots of bookkeeping. I mean, seriously, a game that lays out for you lots of cool stuff that you can do (giving you a structure to build on) without being ridiculously complicated or superfluous.

No really. I don’t think I can stress this enough. Movement rules that don’t suck. It doesn’t matter if somebody bumps the table, because miniatures don’t have to mark your spot. Where your game master doesn’t have to slave over a map only to have someone spill soda on it. You don’t have to invest in expensive plastic miniatures.

You don’t have to measure anything. No rulers. No weird counting spaces around corners, counting every other space for diagonal movement as an extra space, no converting feet to squares and vice versa. Movement that’s cool and not terribly complicated. And you can do lots of different stuff. Dodge, block, whatever.

You can hide/feint/bluff in combat without needing the game master to draw shadows for you. Or without needing to XYZ whatever another game forces you to do to get your special hide-sneak-stealth thing. It isn’t ridiculously broken either, like invisibility often is. No one gets to be invulnerable. Everyone “heals,” not just the priest.

The first few “levels,” if you want to call them that, can be difficult and deadly, like the good old days. There are no dice, just strategy. (Unless you want dice.) You get to do more than just attack each turn of combat. You don’t just “swing your sword to attack,” even if you’re a fighter. You can still do that too, if that’s what your want.

You can make monsters and strange creatures the same way you make player characters, and you can make them simpler or just as complex as you want. I mean, really, I recommend you make them simpler, but if you want to drag out every fight, by all means give the monsters the same advantages as players. Woo!